While I’m dubious of the claim due to the robust permissions management in the latest versions of iOS and Android, it is interesting that a company has come out and said they are doing what everyone is thinking.
And yes they are a subsidiary of the parent of Cox Communications, the ISP, so I would be switching to a competitor ASAP if I had their services
They’re like “we should address the fact that this product sounds exactly like a bleak dystopian future”
The comparisons to Black Mirror are crazy considering that the show serves to always show the downsides of dystopian tech.
Weird for a self proclaimed marketing company to not know that.
well, you call it dystopia, they call it brainstorming :P
Suspicious that this article was written by Joseph Cox.
deleted
They’re all doing it. We’re carrying around listening devices 24/7 and expecting evil corporations not to spy on everything we say and do… why? Because they said they wouldn’t? Because they put their customers ahead of profits? What have these companies done to earn even the slightest degree of trust?
It’s the technical hurdles that have me skeptical that they could do it, at a cost that is profitable, without it being widely known how. Either it’s novel and not being done by anyone by CMG; or it’s not, in which case why is CMG marketing like they are the only ones doing it.
But it’s probably safer to assume that everyone is already listening in so that you are prepared because you know they would if they could.
Yeah, Amazon laying off a lot of folks in their Alexa division makes me skeptical this is real and is scalable.
Amazon failed with Alexa because they couldn’t monetize it enough to make it profitable. If you’re using it to spy and sell data, there’s your profit.
CMG said in a statement that “CMG Local Solutions markets a wide range of advertising tools. Like other advertising companies, some of those tools include third-party vendor products powered by data sets sourced from users by various social media and other applications then packaged and resold to data servicers. Advertising data based on voice and other data is collected by these platforms and devices under the terms and conditions provided by those apps and accepted by their users, and can then be sold to third-party companies and converted into anonymized information for advertisers. This anonymized data then is resold by numerous advertising companies.” “CMG businesses do not listen to any conversations or have access to anything beyond a third-party aggregated, anonymized and fully encrypted data set that can be used for ad placement. We regret any confusion and we are committed to ensuring our marketing is clear and transparent,” the statement added.
lol they are just paying Facebook and other companies for data
(In case we didn’t have enough with dropbox selling our data for AI training!)
